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 Head To Head The Modern Antiquarian Avebury Forum | Start a topic | Search |
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nigelswift wrote: Moth wrote: Fwiw, I wouldn't disagree with that, young Squid. Trubble is, there's no way of telling...! love Moth Actually there is, young Mothkin ;) A delicious one. A psychology department should take hundreds of newcomers round Avebury and Mothers Jam and get them to pick out and rate simulacra and compare the two sets of results... I know of a sarsen which, if you look at its four sides long enough, you'll see at least half a dozen faces on each side. Amazing. However, said stone is only about the size of a grapefruit and sits on my window ledge ;-) Point is, perhaps the simulacra so easily seen in pit-marked sarsens (big and small) were thought by the ancients to show the faces of deities or lost loved ones. Who knows, perhaps it was the custom, on the death of a loved one, to search out a stone with a face 'resembling' the departed; to then take that stone in an act of remembrance to a place like Silbury. Wealthier members of society may have seen their deities or loved ones in the bigger stones, and at Avebury the removal and positioning of those stones may have formed a totemic ritual previously performed in the carving of wood. It may be pushing the idea too far but perhaps it's not unreasonable to suppose that any given stone was selected (over and above another) for its appearance and what it represented or conjured up in the minds of those prepared to shift it some way and stand it up with effort. That being the case, it's sad to think that so many stones that may once have represented a deity or loved one to our ancestors now lay fallen and buried as if they were no more than weather-washed pebbles on a beach. Reply | with quote |  6th August 2009ce 20:16 In reply to: Re: Shapes on Avebury Stones (nigelswift) |
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